Miss Evans looked up. “Shall I accompany you, My Lady?”
April waved a hand. “No need. I’ll not be long.”
She stepped into the hall, ignoring the butler’s warning still echoing in her memory.He requested not to be disturbed.
She passed a series of portraits then turned at the end of the hallway and spotted an open archway. Beyond it, a stairwell curved downward, dim and unused.
A thud sounded from below, and her curiosity stirred.Is someone there? Theo perhaps?She descended.
The air changed as she moved lower—cooler, faintly damp. The stairs gave way to stone floors, and soon, she reached a space unlike the rest of the manor. Stark. Bare. A gymnasium or perhaps a training room.
Then she heard it—a low, guttural sound. A growl, barely human.
April followed the noise, her steps slowing.
At the far end of the chamber, a man slumped in a chair, arms bound behind him, his face a ruin of bruises and blood. One eye was swollen shut; the other barely opened to the flickering torchlight mounted on the wall. Blood trailed from a cut at his temple down to his collarbone, dark and tacky.
Theo stood before him like a figure carved from vengeance, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his shirt clinging slightly to his back with sweat. His breath came in low, harsh drags, and a muscle in his jaw pulsed like the strike of a drum.
There was no detachment in him—no cold aristocratic distance. Only fury. Focused. Devouring.
“Who sent you that night?”
The man groaned but said nothing. Theo struck him, and April stopped breathing.
“Was the money worth it? Answer me.”
The man gave a rasping cough, and Theo’s hand twitched again as if restraining the next blow.
April had frozen where she stood, the shadows swallowing the breath in her throat. Her heart slammed against her ribs. This was not the man who handed her poetry and made her tea sweet. This was someone else entirely—unmasked. Ravaged by some deep, buried pain.
What are you doing, Theodore? What have you done?
She had never seen him like this. Not with wrath in every muscle, not with violence in every word. And she had not known she could fear him.
The man mumbled something.
Theo leaned closer. “Say it again. Say it so I can hear you.”
April stepped back instinctively. Her heel scraped the stone floor, and the sound echoed.
Theodor turned.
His eyes met hers, blazing, and dark with something she did not recognize.
April stepped back again. Her hand found the wall beside her. She did not know what frightened her more: the man before her tied and bloodied, or the one she had come to sayyesto.
Eighteen
April didn’t breathe. Couldn’t.
The look in his eyes chilled her to the bone. Not fury alone. Something deeper—colder. As if the man she’d come to accept was not a man at all but a tempest forged of pain and vengeance.
The dim torchlight threw shadows across his face, sharpening the hard lines of his cheekbones, the tension around his mouth. His hands—those same hands that once held a book of poetry—were bruised and streaked with dried blood.
Her feet moved before she was aware of them, retreating one slow step at a time.
“April—”
